Even with the four greatest (and I've heard better, but it was a long time ago...a team that included Tucker, Warren, Milanov and I forget who the Azucena was...Elias, maybe) I find a lot of Trovatore boring...and, of course, half the audience is just sitting there waiting to see if the tenor is going to go for the big one (which Verdi did not write)... Opera is so much a blend of the words and the music. The last act of Traviata never failes to reduce me to tears. For some reason I want to giggle during the last act of Trovatore.

I heard most of it on the radio. Radvanovsky sounded rather strange - good high notes, good low notes, but otherwise a very fluttery sound. Alvarez was fine, Hvorostovsky quite good but not very Italianate (however, he was a great deal better than when I last saw him, as a phoned-in Rigoletto at Covent Garden). Dolora Zajick was the star of the show, IMO. (Does anyone know that, in reality, her surname is pronounced "ZIGHTS"?)

It's Verdi's most tuneful opera, IMO, and I think that the convoluted plot is no worse than many others (e.g. Rimsky-Korsakov's The Tsar's Bride at Covent Garden, which I saw last week: full of holes but nice music).

Italian opera at the Met: the audience is just desperate to applaud everything, whenever there's the slightest pause.

And in answer to Kay's question: the average age of opera-goers of some operas that I've seen recently was, relatively speaking, quite young. Examples: Peter Maxwell Davies's Kommilitonen! (to be seen at the Juilliard in November) and Mark-Anthony Turnage's Anna Nicole.

I was thinking more of the telecasts...we draw probably more young people to the live Opera than the Symphony does...boy, is that a decrepit bunch.

Of course Opera Roanoke makes a certain number of unsold tickets available FREE to students...that helps.

The audience at the Met when they were on camera seemed to cover a wider age range.

If by "tuneful", Andrew, you mean stuff like the Anvil thing that will run in your head forever if you let it, yes, I guess it is, but if I have to have an Verdian operatic ear worm, I'd much prefer, say, Parigi o cara or Va, piensero

Whatever it is, it will only last until tomorrow when I go to the symphony...which will feature "The Planets"...

Originally posted by Andrew:Italian opera at the Met: the audience is just desperate to applaud everything, whenever there's the slightest pause.

Ah, but you must have noticed the lack of applause following "Stride la vampa". The orchestra even paused a moment to allow it; but where I was expecting thunderous applause, there was only silence. Ha, maybe the Met audience was too stunned to respond quickly. But I agree completely it was Dolora's opera, and we're not the only ones who think so. At intermission I passed two guys in their 20s and one of them was saying, "For my money, it's the old chick's show." Maybe Verdi should have stuck with his original title.

I'd say roughly a third of "my" audience was under 70, and they were enjoying it. We fell into a conversation with a young woman walking out of the theater, and she was riding an adrenalin high. She was laughing at the over-the-top plot and loving it, saying this opera had everything, right up through the punch-in-the-gut ending that Kay finds laughable. I'd say that was the right way to approach Trovatore -- not only accepting the artificiality but reveling in it.

Verdi was certainly going for popular appeal -- melody after melody, it never stops. I read somewhere that Verdi had written to his music publisher that he wanted every organ grinder in Italy to be playing a tune from Trovatore. Well, I hope he got his wish. I love this old turkey.

It's fairly common for tenors to skip the reprise of "di quella pira", and I'm pretty certain that that's what Alvarez did. On the other hand, the high C (or whatever it is) that wasn't written by Verdi seems to be compulsory these days.